Tony – a deeply trained engineer with years
of experience and Giotto a designer/engineer were flying friends and saw an
advert for a competition to create a new type of plane that fitted in below a
certain weight restriction. And if they could design and build something it
might open up a completely new opportunity. But for them it was purely the
challenge to see if it could be done.
Their good fortune was they won the
competition. I bet their families did not think the same!
The plane takes on microlights – which are
frankly very Wright Brothers – canvas and scaffolding mainly. Tony and Giotto came up with a radical new
design, using state of the art materials, a wankel (rotary) engine and a superb
design – so it does not look like a crop sprayer from the 1950s as many light
aircraft still do.
If you like iPads and great looking design
– e-Go is for you!
From the design stage to see if they could do it
– they realized they also had to invent production methods, build ovens to cure
materials, create completely new engineering processes. This was cutting edge
stuff.
Once they burnt through the meager prize
fund – they continued to boot strap, using cow sheds, garages, kitchen tables and the
main buzz that I got was to se how they had harnessed the wonderful talent pool
around Cambridge to volunteer their time. Industrial designers, engineers,
software, pilots, race car engineers, electronics, and much, much, more. At various stages of the hard long
slog there must have been around 35 – 40 volunteers. Yes – OK they were fed in
fabulous food and drink from time to time.
But to be honest Tony and Giotto have had a huge level of probono skilled talent to get this far.
Software start-ups are used to
community-based code writing, sharing and so on. But in leading edge technology
and engineering – almost completely unheard of.
The passion and commitment of Tony and
Giotto is what gets them their charisma and the design and novelty
just appeals to the geeks and investors around Cambridge.
And because of their hands on approach they
were also able to interlock design, build, test, re-test and finalize all at a
great speed. Maybe not fast enough for their investors – but just try building
a completely new type of plane from a design idea in your head on a kitchen
table laptop!
Once they hit some early stage milestones –
like detailed drawings, scale models, and could show progress they raised their
first round of serious funding. This got them to their prototype. They are now
in another funding round to get the plane into a “production” state.
Solid orders are coming in as well. There
could be more but anyone who is familiar with the Everett Rogers innovation
adoption curve will recognize that they need their early customers to encourage
later stage adopters to follow.
Will they make money?
Hope so – they are at the very start of a
completely new category and maybe it will take time to get the
volume of sales going that they can feel it is a commercial success and
investors are happy. But the real measure of their success is the creation of a
new single-seater and surely they will create their own competitors in due
course.
So two people, passionate about flying,
engineering and design have gone from a “let us see if we can do it”; to
raising money; researching materials, methods and systems; holding on to
investors; growing a wonderful pool of volunteers; building a prototype to
demonstrate it can do what it says and surely they will then go on to achieve
real sales. Why not?
The project is not without risks and
barriers – but it seems to me since they have got this far – they can tackle
the next stages of the journey too.
Why I admire this is because it is not a
low barrier to entry – website based venture. We see those around every
street corner as there is an explosion of incubators and accelerators and yes of course they
play a very valuable role – they create a general buzz around
entrepreneurship, provide training and every so often a real venture comes out
of the fog.
A company like e-Go can only be done by
people who have been there and done similar things before, carry depth of
knowledge and insights. What they do is create a disruptive technology and then others can follow in due course.
Well done Tony and Giotto
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